U n s e e n - H a n d

I have not made a list of movies I’ve seen/enjoyed in a while, so here are some good bloody films you animals (like you @havanapitbull). I’ve been on a J-Horror kick:

JIGOKU / HELL / THE SINNERS OF HELL

A cast of terrible people meet on the border of hell itself and talk about how their horrible lives are all related in horrible ways. The psychedelic cinematography, goofy gore and actual lake of blood make this worth seeing.

NOBI / FIRES ON THE PLAIN

A Japanese soldier tries to survive the war at the cost of his own humanity. Fun!

FUDOH: THE NEXT GENERATION

First of a trilogy of Young Yakuza films by Takashi Miike, you have the extreme gore and weird sex hangups in his later films but this one was filmed in the 90′s, so nostalgia I guess. There’s a tattoo made of human blood on our main character and also a vaginal blow-dart! Miike!

GUINEA PIG: MERMAID IN A MANHOLE

Unlike the previous few Guinea Pig movies that are just hyper-realistic gore effects for an hour, you instead have a weird pseudo-romance directed and written by horror mangaka Hideshi Hino. And it shows! You have a pervert artist falling in love with a mermaid he finds exploring the sewer. As she slowly rots to death outside of her native habitat of filth, he paints her portrait using her rotting body as paint.

AI NO BOREI / EMPIRE OF PASSION

A torrid love affair ends in a murder and a dead husband thrown down a well. The rest of the movie has the wife and her lover enjoying their new life of passion and slowly worrying more and more about neighborhood gossip and a ghost showing up. This one is a slow burn, probably one of the best movies I’ve seen all month.

DEATH POWDER

People losing control of their bodies in a fetishistic cyberpunk hell. Thats really it mostly, lots of pretty pictures of flesh.

GEMINI

Shin’ya Tsukamoto is easily one of the five best directors in the world in my book, and Gemini is one of the reasons why. You have the standard tale of twin brothers torn apart at birth and one coming home for revenge against the other, but Tsukamoto delivers such a raw alien sensuality to every scene that makes you feel like a creepy voyeur into these wounded and insane lives. Its damn great.

LUCKY SKY DIAMOND

A girl wakes up in a hospital that probably isn’t a hospital. I’m not saying anymore beyond this point, its better to go in as blind as possible here. The true epitome of the inherent creepiness of VHS-quality video.

FUAN NO TANE / PET PEEVE

Betty Blue (AKA 37°2 le matin) | Jean-Jacques Beineix | 1986

Vagabond is a lot like old cowboy and samurai stories, where half of it is about that dream of a beautiful past. A belief that honor, purity and some small kind of goodness existed out in the world. Vagabonds samurai are artists, their fights always have a bitter beauty. Even the worst scoundrel has some ounce of that honorable nature. There is an ounce of desperation in its idealism.

Shigurui is the price of believing in that dream. The ideal cannot be met because all of the people at the peak of their craft are broken by it, or do so on the backs of others. Samurai are more often people who fight for a living, or worse, enjoy it. Shigurui is about the eternal victory of the base nature of man. (And I do mean man over humanity, Shigurui has a clear point about how easily toxicity and perversion gestates in a hyper-masculine environment. Vagabond barely even considers this).

The dream of samurai in Vagabond is what you want to be real, but you know that the samurai of Shigurui were real. The fact that Vagabond is the more famous series speaks volumes about this, we want the chivalry to be real because we know barbarism is just easier.

Possession is about hidden things. And revealing them, or simply speaking my theories on them may ruin it for some.

So here is a kind of odd explanation for things seen in the film, without ruining the finer details. Though you will find hints.

Possession

directed by Andrzej Żuławski

Like many similar films it inspired, Possession is a film largely known as a horror film. But it is truly about the decomposition of a relationship between two people.

Sam Niell plays Mark, a Spy home from a mysterious job abroad that is never explained, but it involves the iconography of suitcases, vials of poison and cash; perhaps one of the most realistic portrayals of spycraft simply because it fulfills the purpose of his job. Equally mysterious is the reason for his wife Anna, played by Isabelle Adjani, wanting a divorce upon his return. To the viewer these hidden things are all what drives their unusual actions, and in a lesser film, would ruin it. But Both actors portray their characters as people nearly boiling over with kept ideas and hidden perceptions, their moments of screaming and silence are filmed in an eerie manner that foreshadows the occult nature of the genre. Comparatively the genre films of Tarkovsky and Godard adopt a similar style of simple shooting the real in a manner that makes it seem unreal, Stalker is made apocalyptic and Alphaville futuristic through only stage, script and shot. 

The obscure actions of both characters, gripped with their own obsessions and paranoia are what switches Mark and Anna from protagonist to antagonist, elevating the shadowy morality of human nature to a heightened level. Niel’s performance bubbles over through his clear and intricate control of Marks voice; each word is uttered with complete control over lexicon, accent and sibilance only slightly rupturing in times of extreme emotion. But despite this aura of control, Mark utters odd phrases like “come and admire him” about his own son, and stares unblinkingly at his wife when trying to connect with her on an emotional level. He is a man who has either been changed by his work too much, or never was all there in some respect.

Then again, despite the masterful performance Mark is the most dull part of the film.

Anna is the soul of the film, in the beginning the film she gushes with the emotion of an emotionally abused woman that is clearly made to place the viewer in a grey area towards her. Either as an abused woman to take pity upon or to dislike for her weakness. A bitter duality that becomes murkier as the film progresses, the viewer can see her as the embodiment of a monstrous freedom or the victim of an equally monstrous crime done against her. As the obsession Mark feels for her drives his already shallow mind to darker places, she descends to a more literal hell as she finds a new lover/abuser she uses to either escape from Mark, or the world he represents to her.

And their poor son Bob who, to the audience, is the initial source of their rift, is practically a non-character. An animate portrayal of the life both of them want, but that neither believe they deserve.

The duality of perception and reality in this film is probably the central force behind the growth of the characters. Anna’s initial moments of suffering are usually delivered blatantly and without music, unlike Marks tortured state that is almost always accompanied with a melodramatic sting or noir-style centered closeup in a doorway or half-hidden by setting. Mark is a strange mismatch of macho ideology with his mysterious and exiting government job overshadowing his inability to be a father, husband or person. Additionally the mysterious two-timing of Mark and Heinrich is an exaggeration of the passions most expect of a beautiful woman like Anna, but Anna’s fraying psyche shows her as more of a tortured figure that is a victim of the empowerment she thinks she wants, note her sarcastic boasts of “fucking around all the time” during one of the first fights with Mark. Her flashes between victim and empowerment are repeated and subverted as she takes her new lover, mistreats Bob and is replaced in Marks heart by the physically similar Helen.

Helen is a pure figure, or is portrayed as one once Anna begins to cause more and more chaos. Helens job as a schoolteacher, resemblance to Anna and more serene nature is the embodiment of what Mark left behind before his many jobs, or at least it is what he thinks he left behind. The perfect foil for Annas lover, fulfilling the almost alchemic obsession with duality that is repeated often in the film. Annas bizarre friend Marge is Annas initial opposite; a flirt portrayed in such a consciously comic fashion that she becomes one of the more disturbing characters in the film. Marks co-workers and the agent he tasks to follow Anna are equally comic characters that do little more than cause more chaos between the two, sometimes going out of their way to do the opposite of whatever their “side” in the conflict tells them to do.

Żuławski takes the ancient “romantic strife” narrative and turns the familiar pacing of these films to a frantic march, and the familiar settings of kitchen and living-room to locations that look the same but feel far uglier and alien. Berlin becomes a strange place without location, nationality is lost despite the politics of barbed wire, walls and soulless architecture that the characters dwell in. There are barely more than a handful of actors in any shot, and the few non-character extras are either children, elderly or seen too fast or at too far away. The dizzying pace that Żuławski takes from the agoraphobic outdoors to claustrophobic indoors creates an uncanny effect, the viewer sees the city as set before setting and each shot and angle becomes obscured in a kind of obscure iconography that convinces the viewer it means something, for if it did not so much would be senseless and chaotic. Żuławski frames Mark in doors and spins rooms about his chair, he places Anna in the middle of every room and road or constantly moving (especially something to notice in the subway scene). Helen is seen above or in-front of Mark in most shots, and the eyes of Annas lover are hidden until it is too late. All of these and more are repeated but never explained, the paranoia of the narrative infects the viewer.

trulyunpleasant has shared something incredible with us, that i have a weird feeling a lot of people will relate to in some deep-inside way. take time to read it, i bet you won’t be disappointed (and also send me your spooky stories still! don’t stop till halloween!):